Steady supercritical Taylor vortex flow

Abstract

Experiments studying steady supercritical Taylor vortex flow have been made using pairs of long cylinders with two different radius ratios, three fluids of different viscosities and three different end boundaries for the fluid column. The emphasis in these experiments is on the determination of the wavelength of the Taylor vortices and the size of the end rings. The wavelength which one measures in a finite cylinder differs from the wavelengths found theoretically for infinitely long cylinders. Provided that the end effects were properly taken into account, the wavelength of singly periodic Taylor vortices in aninfinitely long cylinder was found to remain constant between T/Tc = 1 and T/Tc, ≈ 80 in experiments with radius ratios η = 0·505 and η = 0·727. Further studies of Taylor vortex flow at very high Taylor numbers, where the vortices are either doubly periodic or truly turbulent, showed that the wavelength increases under these conditions. However, the observed wavelengths were no longer unique but distributed statistically around a wavelength larger than the critical wavelength.